Lizzie Dawson - Summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati [tekst, tłumaczenie i interpretacja piosenki]

The circumstances that gave birth to two of the most important works in Gothic fiction is legendary in itself. In the summer of 1816, Lord Byron rented the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva from 10 June to 1 November. Byron had arrived at Lake Geneva in May after the rumours surrounding his separation from his wife and increasing debts had made him leave England, never to return. He met and befriended the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was travelling with his future wife, the eighteen year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her step-sister Claire Clairmont, with whom Byron had had an affair in London. Byron settled at the Villa Diodati with his personal physician, John William Polidori, meanwhile Shelley rented the smaller Maison Chappuis nearby.

The weather was unseasonably cold and stormy, it was "The Year Without Summer" in which the world was suffering a long, cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. Mary Shelley later described the "incessant rain" of "that wet, ungenial summer". When the rain kept them indoors at the Villa Diodati over three days in June, the five turned to reading fantastical stories. Reportedly, on 16 June, after reading aloud from a French translation of Fantasmagoriana, Byron issued the challenge that they should all attempt to write a ghost story themselves. Shelley wrote a now-lost ghost story, which Mary reported was "founded on the experiences of his early life." Byron began Fragment of a Novel, which he later abandoned. Polidori's first attempt was mocked by the others, but he used Byron's Fragment to produce 'The Vampyre', the progenitor of the vampire genre.

By midnight of 18 June, Polidori reported the group "really began to talk ghostly." When he repeated the lines from Coleridge's Christabel in which Geraldine exposes her deformed breast and scaly torso, "a silence ensued and Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle." Byron contradicted Polidori's description and the cause of the outburst, but Shelley told Mary he had "suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him."

Mary Godwin, meanwhile, was unable to think of story: "Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative." During one evening, the discussions turned to the nature of the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated", Mary noted, "galvanism had given token of such things". Unable to sleep that night, she beheld the grim terrors of her "waking dream":
  "I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world."
Mary recalled her eyes opened "in terror [...] a thrill of fear ran through me [...] I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom." With the collaboration of Shelley, her dream became Frankenstein.